‘How Are You Any Different?’: CPAC Social Media Censorship Panel Protested over Deplatforming of Jim Hoft

A panel at CPAC 2018 on the topic of social media censorship faced protests on Friday, after attendees asked how the organizers were any different from social networks for deplatforming the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft.

During the Q&A session of the panel, which was moderated by American Principles Project Foundation Executive Director Terry Schilling, Gateway Pundit reporter Cassandra Fairbanks asked how Schilling was any different from the censorship-heavy social networks which were discussed during the panel.

Many members of the audience, which included commentator and author Jack Posobiec, the Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Wintrich, and political operative Ali Akbar, applauded and cheered when Fairbanks asked the question.

Schilling avoided the question, replying that the panel, which featured fired Google employee James Damore, lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, investigative journalist James O’Keefe, software engineer and tech entrepreneur Marlene Jaeckel, and the Media Research Center’s Dan Gainor, was about internet censorship, and moved onto the next question.

Conservative commentator and author Pam Geller dropped out of the panel this week, after she was asked by organizers to kick Hoft off.

“Late last night, I received a call … demanding that I remove one of the speakers from the panel. I would not do this,” Geller declared. “I told them it was unconscionable that a panel on free speech — I mean, it’s, I don’t know if anybody sees the irony.”

As previously reported by Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak, the panel “was not officially organized by CPAC or the host organization, the American Conservative Union,” and was “sponsored by the American Principles Project (APP) in coordination with CPAC.”

Schilling told Breitbart News that the cancelation of the panel in its original formation was “completely Pamela’s call and completely avoidable.”

“I didn’t want the entire conversation to be about Jim Hoft. And guess what? Now it is,” he added. “This right here is why no one should ever work with her.”

In an article on Wednesday, Geller claimed CPAC had joined left-wing social networks in censoring conservatives.

“[Terry] Schilling is CPAC — he is an ACU board member. He and Dan Schneider cobbled together this last minute solution,” she explained. “And it was Schilling who made this all about Hoft, when Tucker Carlson and others have pointed out the same things Hoft has. CPAC is not going to throw Tucker under the bus. But Hoft and me? Sure.”

“This is just the latest in how CPAC has worked to sabotage true conservatives,” Geller expressed.

Following the protest at the CPAC panel, Hoft congratulated Fairbanks on Twitter for “calling out” Schilling, while Wintrich called Schilling “amoral, a hypocrite, and a fraud.”